


don't be afraid, you've just got your eyes closed

by openended



Category: Pacific Rim (2013), Supernatural
Genre: Episode: s05e10 Abandon All Hope..., Gen, Jaeger Pilots
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:02:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1071840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openended/pseuds/openended
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jo's not meant to be a pilot. Then again, the kaiju weren't meant to happen at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	don't be afraid, you've just got your eyes closed

**Author's Note:**

  * For [wandofhawthorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/wandofhawthorn/gifts).



Roadhouse Blue has been Jo’s home since she can remember. PPDC doesn’t let anyone drift in a jaeger until they’re 18, but she’s a Shatterdome rat. She played in the cockpit as a kid when she wasn’t hanging out in LOCCENT driving Bobby nuts asking what each button and lever and display meant.

He put up with her, explained it all, and she paid attention (paid attention to the techs and engineers too, between drops when she most certainly wasn’t supposed to be where she was) and by the time she was 17, could rebuild Blue from the ground up if need be. It’s her home, and she’ll fight anyone that tries to point out the physical address on her driver’s license.

She’s not meant to be a pilot. That’s Bill and Ellen’s job. She’s primed for an engineer gig on the Mark II project (tracked into the program at the age of twelve when the marshall found her drawing diagrams in a corner of LOCCENT at 2:00am, unable to sleep with her parents out on patrol).

But then Bill gets hurt and all she can do is stand there outside the glass, watching as the doctors crowd around her father, listening to her mother scream about how she didn’t drag his sorry ass all the way back to Vladivostok for him to die on her in a goddamn hospital.

Jo knows what’s going on. She’s 18, has seen death in the ‘dome since she was 10. But she’s frozen in place, one palm on the glass, the other curled into a fist at her side. Eventually (hours, minutes, days, she’s never sure; her brain doesn’t let her acknowledge the day her father died), strong hands cup her shoulders and gently pull her away from the window. “My mom,” she protests, looking over her shoulder.

“Sasha is with her,” Aleksis says in a voice far quieter than should be allowed for his frame. “Come, there is food.”

Aleksis and Sasha are eventually called out on patrol and Jo sits alone in the mess hall, dinner long since finished, feeling very insignificant. The door opens, echoing in the quiet, and she looks up from drawing designs in the remnants of her soup. It’s her mother. She waits to say anything until Ellen sits down. She knows the news, knows that no one comes back from that much blood.

Her mother looks like hell, pale and scraped up, blood underneath her fingernails, but Jo has to ask. Before this conversation turns where it has to, she needs to know. “What happened?”

“Category 2,” Ellen says, voice distant and measured, easier to say without any emotion. Jo must know the details, she spends every shift in LOCCENT at Bobby’s side these days, but how she gets through this is by stating facts. All of them. “Whipped its tail around, caught us on the broadside.”

Joe winces. Jaegers are as invincible as possible, but still subject to the laws of physics. She’s seen jaegers sent flying from kaiju pissed off enough to find the momentum. She listens to the rest, knows the exact blow that ultimately killed her father, and isn’t any better for it. But at least she knows.

Ellen takes a deep breath, steeling herself. “You know what’s next.”

“Yeah,” Jo says. It’s not where her life is supposed to go. But then again, the kaiju weren’t supposed to happen at all.

* * *

“Fuck off, Winchester,” Jo laughs, helmet tucked under her arm. “Twenty bucks and six pack says we take this thing down before you even get your feet wet.”

Dean snorts. “You’re on.” Sam stares at him from the corner, a subtle glare to quit loitering and get suited up already. Dean rolls his eyes and heads for his gear.

Jo smirks at both of them. Blue may be a Mark I and a relic compared to the Mark III Impala Devil, but she’d bet everything she owned against them taking out the Category 3 on its way before the Winchesters have figured out the power button. Too many bells and whistles, the new designs. She and Sasha have stayed up countless nights arguing the benefits of Cherno and Blue to these guys. Bobby calls her name over the intercom, sounding mildly annoyed that she hasn’t showed up yet, and she heads toward Blue’s docking bay. They’ve dubbed this one Hellhound and she has plans to make it the fifth mark on Blue’s hull.

Things go pear-shaped within moments of them breaking water.

Blue’s broken open in four places and taking on water, but Jo’s trapped under a crushed piece of hull. Her leg’s probably broken, but absolutely everything hurts and she can’t tell for sure. She’s still commed in to everyone and screams at them to go; she’ll blow the reactor core and take the damn kaiju with her.

“This thing is _not_ making landfall, get the hell out of here!” she shouts into her comms while looking at her mother. Impala’s limping its way over for a rescue. They’ve stunned Hellhound, but no one has eyes on it anymore; even LOCCENT has lost its signal, but none of them are so deluded as to think it’s dead.

_“Not without you, Jo. This thing isn’t taking any of us out.”_

Ellen finds the emergency headset in the wreckage at the bottom of the pod and throws her broken helmet overboard before settling the headset over her ear. She blinks and wipes a trickle of blood away from her eye. “Negative, Winchester,” she’s not even sure which one she’s talking to. “Go back to base, we’ll blow Blue’s core when it comes back in for the kill but you need to be out of the blast radius.”

_“We’re not leaving you,”_ at the same time as “Mom!”

Ellen shakes her head. “We need to manually override the core and Jo can’t move.”

“My hands still work, get me a computer and I can override it from here.”

“That’s an order,” Ellen says. Rank doesn’t exist among pilots, but her eight years of seniority has to count for something.

_“Bullshit, you can’t order us to leave you behind.”_ Impala’s sleek silhouette comes into view.

_“No, but I can.”_ Bobby’s voice comes crackling through their comms, as resigned and defeated as any of them have ever heard him. _“Ellen’s right, they can’t guarantee a core breach from the pod and you’re too damaged to take it out on your own. We’re not losing both of you today.”_

_“We don’t have to lose anyone!”_

Out of the corner of her eye, Jo sees the kaiju roar up out of the ocean, about half a click to the east. “Dean, go!” she shouts at the same time as LOCCENT goes crazy in her ear, relaying Hellhound’s location to everyone; background chatter has Cherno Alpha getting suited and prepped as backup if this bullshit plan fails entirely.

_“Impala Devil, back to base, now.”_

In the split second she sees Impala hesitate before turning, Jo knows the exact conversation the Winchesters are having. She’d be having the same conversation with her mother if their positions were reversed. She switches her comm channel to a private link with Dean. “It’s okay,” she says, “this is how we’re supposed to go out.” The lives of jaeger pilots are not long, and they all know it the day they sign up.

_“Give it hell, Jo,”_ Dean says before flipping back to the public channel. _“I would like it on record that this is a fucking stupid order and neither of us like it.”_

_“Objection noted, get your sorry asses back here.”_

“I can blow the core from here, Mom,” Jo says, though the protest is pointless now.

“I know,” Ellen says. “But I’m not letting you die alone.” Once Jo finishes rerouting the core controls, she settles her hands over her daughter's. If they have to do this, they're doing this together.


End file.
